I'm looking to understand more about what goes into making a con work well and what makes a con fail spectacularly.

This isn't to necessarily make a new con, that's not really my shtick... as of yet anyway. I more want to find ways to automate some processes, make some processes easier, faster, and a lot more manageable.

In order to start looking at that, I need to know more about what all needs to go into making things work well from a management perspective. I've read the articles on booking the event places first and to have a variety of options so that you have a bargaining chip before announcing locations and times and all of that but I'm not really looking for that.

Don't get me wrong, that's extremely useful information but I'm talking more along the lines of how submission processes are handled for vendors and how their locations are decided. Stuff like that.